Eli

"There was an old lady who swallowed a fly" by Eli

Remember the good ol' days when I used to post every day during the month of November? It's not like we're not busy doing things or busy growing or busy learning, but it's just getting harder and harder to document their changes especially when the changes are mostly mental instead of physical. Not that Eli isn't growing either, he's managed to grow an inch and a half since his birthday which makes all of his new pants flood pants...

But, today I'm going to share some of Eli's new milestones, not because I'm bragging, but because this blog has turned out to be Eli's and Sadie's "Life Book." I figure, one day, they might just want to know this stuff.

Eli finally grew out of his old tennis shoes, which meant new ones. We got him shoes with laces so he could learn to tie his shoes. And guess what? He learned to tie his shoes, and Dennis' shoes, and my shoes...

The big big thing is that Eli is now a reader. He's reading some easy level readers and some harder picture books and is doing pretty good. Dennis and I just decided to teach him one day (he's not reading at school yet) and he's been pretty excited about it and has been trying to read every book since. He has a bank of 50 or so high frequency words and is really good at just saying what makes sense or using the pictures as clues. He attempts sounding out, but I really try to discourage that because he's not very proficient at it. Reading is such an exciting milestone. I love watching him enjoy reading to us, not that we don't still read to him!

Other milestones from the past few months:
**Getting himself going and pumping on the swing
**Counting to 199
**Wiping his own behind clean. Clean! (maybe not important to anyone but me!)

I'm sure that there are lots more milestones that I've forgotten to mention along way. Somehow he seems to be growing faster than I thought possible.